The upgrade is coming first to the A7rii, but then to "other E-mount cameras". IMO the A7ii is almost certainly on the list. I hope it'll also come to the A7 and A7r, which surely isn't too much to ask.

Not that I've ever found anything wrong with the compression, but it can be nice to have the uncompressed option.

But you have to push *really* hard to see this in practise, and then pixel peep some. More interesting might be to see if the posterisation that Ming Thein reported (due to the compression's tone-curve) is resolved.

People have been speculating that the reason we're not getting lossless compression is because the processors were specifically designed to accommodate lossy compression. I don't know why Sony would hamstring themselves like that in the first place, but giving us uncompressed RAW is good enough for me.

Maybe users have something to do with that. If everyone ranted for the "lack of losslessly compressed raw", Sony might have done that. Instead, people cried for "uncomrpessed raw" and, lo & behold, that's what they get. Besides, some people have trouble with the concept ot raw and lossless compression, what with "raw should be pure untouched sensor data" and similar nonsense.

Sony uses what amounts to a bespoke processor, right? It's specifically designed to process images. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that the lossy raw compression is a hardware-based job, just like how h.265 compression/decompression is generally designed to be performed as a hardware-based job, not a software one, especially in the mobile sphere. It might be impossible for the current Bionz processor to losslessly compress raw files without draining too much battery-life, overheating the processor/camera, or simply taking too much time. Who's to say that the requirements would be so different for lossy vs lossless compression? I'm not sure, but it's not a bridge too far to imagine that this is the case.

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